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An Imagined Judas

The Autobiography of Judas Iscariot. — By Alfred Tresidder Sheppard

‘The Autobiography of Judas Iscariot’ is a strangely uneven, incalculable novel. The beginning, which tells of the childhood of Judas, is a series of violently seen, savagely felt incidents. There is his fight with the tiny boy who taunts him for being a bastard; then his capture by the robbers on the sea-coast, who try to drown him, his shivering childhood on the fringe of their camp, and his recapture by a rich Arab chieftain, travelling to Baghdad. Here, in the palace, he found favour in his lord's eyes and lived in the harem, until he was sixteen, and then, in another fit of rage, he killed the old eunuch, Hormisdas, and fled to Joppa.

I looked upwards; the sky was black and ominous, and in a few seconds rain fell in immense drops. People on the quay scattered; there were left but a few beggars, clamouring for alms. Some were blind, some eaten away by leprosy; all were filthy. A man had been charming snakes; as his audience dispersed, he put the snakes and his reed into a silk bag, and went away cursing.

From the chapter which begins with these words the narrative changes. It is more sustained, and the style settles into—if we may use the expression—a weary stride. It is a kind of half-swinging, half-loping gait, and it seems, somehow, to fit the restless, eager, doubting young Judas. The author makes us feel the tragedy of the man who is chosen for the crime, how he is, in spite of himself, for ever being prepared for his part, and half seeking to escape from it, and half lured on. What had his life been until he met Jesus but a schooling in how to destroy, how to betray, how to sell himself? And those strange moments when he sees himself as a rival of Jesus—is not he page 257 too a wanderer, a sufferer infinitely weary, a man who would enter as a king into his own kingdom?—are very powerfully suggested. Judas is the dark mocking shadow of Jesus; the light maddens and exasperates him, and yet he cannot tear himself from it. The strongest bond of all, that of the saviour and the betrayer, binds them together.

The mistake Mr. Sheppard has made is in allowing our view of this tortured creature to be interrupted so often by giving us his account of the events in the life of Jesus. Here, again, we encounter the strange, flat dullness which seems to brood over these stories when they are retold, and, although the author's reason for introducing them is to show how Judas never could wholly accept their miraculous explanation, he buries his hero beneath them.